A key difference between the Spanish and Portuguese Jewries is that the former disintegrated slowly, acrimoniously, and often as a direct consequence of Judeophobic violence, while the latter did not.111 Portuguese Jewry as a whole ceased to exist in an instant, and only by the most superficial and pragmatic of official acts. Despite episodes of brutality and discrimination, Portuguese Jews suffered nothing comparable to the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 that gave rise to the converso problem in Castile and Aragon.112 Furthermore, unlike their Spanish counterparts, Portuguese Jews did not have to endure furious waves of conversionist and Judeophobic propaganda. In Portugal there was never any possibility of friction between the converted and the unconverted, as occurred in Spain, since baptism had swept up all the Lusitanian kehillot.113 Crucially, in Portugal most of the converted did not come under inquisitorial scrutiny, though that sorry fate would befall their descendants.
For these reasons, the former Jews of Portugal were able to retain a measure of internal cohesiveness and a sense of continuity with the (Jewish) past. If nothing else, certain group instincts passed by inertia from one generation of Luso-conversos to the next. As late as the seventeenth century, Portuguese conversos still tended to maintain their intracommunal bonds by pursuing endogamous marriage alliances and cultivating tightly knit commercial and professional relationships.114 In many cases, the familial and commercial networks formed by these bonds resembled or even continued ones that existed among Portuguese Jews prior to 1497. Additionally, cristãos-novos inherited many of the professional roles of their Jewish predecessors and thus much of the Jews’ social and political position in Portuguese society.115 When dealing with external authorities, Lusitanian conversos often behaved as a community, and the authorities treated them accordingly. This happened, for example, when conversos pooled together enormous sums of money and solicited João III and the pope through semiofficial representatives in a failed attempt to prevent the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition.116 Such communal patterns of activity would be repeated later, for example in the above-mentioned negotiations with Philip II of Spain.
Again, the probability is high that many if not most Luso-conversos retained a consciousness of belonging to an identifiable social group quite distinct from the Ibero-Christian mainstream. Many cristãos-novos developed a sense of ethnic difference.117 This group consciousness probably had roots in an awareness of common descent, and likely derived sustenance from circumstantial factors. Among these factors were continual social and economic intercourse among cristãos-novos, as well as the persistence of Old Christian prejudice against conversos irrespective of the latter’s religious convictions.
The entry of a sizable “Portuguese” element into the Spanish scene after 1580 was a watershed in the history of all peninsular conversos. By that time, the virtual disappearance of native crypto-Judaism had caused a shift in Spanish attitudes toward cristianos nuevos. Rather than focusing on religious behavior per se, these attitudes now focused on the purported ethnic or racial characteristics of Judeoconversos. So too, words like converso, which had applied to actual converts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had become hereditary labels with predominantly racial or ethnic meanings. The emergence of collective designations such as gente del linaje (people of the lineage), esta raza (this race), esta casta (this caste), esta nación (this nation), and gente de la nación (people of the Nation), underlined the perceptual turn toward racialism that took place in Castile and Aragon during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.118
Once in Spain, Portuguese conversos presented a challenge to the conversophobic imagination because they revived the specter of widespread heresy at a time when racial criteria had become central in Spanish thinking about human difference and social danger. Not long after the arrival of thousands of Luso-conversos, terms such as portugueses de la nación—or simply, portugueses—came into popular use as a means of differentiating between Spanish conversos and those of foreign provenance. A practical effect of the new code words was to define Portuguese New Christians as a dangerous group in their own right. In time, the appellation “Portuguese” acquired the same cross-generational meaning that the term converso had attained at the turn of the sixteenth century: by the 1600s, Spaniards typically employed the word “Portuguese” to identify New Christians who were descended from Portuguese immigrants. The difference was that the designation “Portuguese” connoted a particularly grave religious menace as much as it connoted a purely racial one.
One result of these developments is the conceptual muddle exemplified by the narrative testimony of the informants in the Pereira investigation. The various instances of semantic slippage in that case do not suggest the relatively unambiguous trend toward racial or ethnic definitions of “otherness” that had taken place during the sixteenth century, but a chaotic ideational landscape in which several ethnic, racial, religious, and economic conceptions of conversos’ “otherness” combined in common parlance to articulate the paranoid anxieties of a rather bewildered Spanish public. It was a landscape born of the Portuguese influx and the perceptual challenge that the influx posed, namely, how to understand, define, and identify the new converso danger.
Pereira’s own avowed dislike of wealthy merchants is an example of a widespread type of anxiety concerning the roles that conversos played—and were thought to play—in the economic life of Spain and Portugal. In both countries there were small numbers of conversos who occupied prominent positions in commerce and high finance. This is one reason that a stereotype developed of conversos as powerful and rapacious “businessmen.” The Portuguese term homens de negocios, its Spanish equivalent, hombres de negocios and the bilingual term mercaderes gave linguistic expression to this stereotype. By the early 1600s, those terms, like the more generic hombres de la nation (men of the Nation) had become popular euphemisms for conversos.
Modern scholars have tended to regard New Christians as a predominantly urban merchant bourgeoisie.119 On the whole, this generalization is probably accurate given the high proportion of conversos who were city-bound traffickers and retailers. It would skew the record, however, to ignore the fact that conversos also took part in such occupations as soldiering, farming, cattle raising, domestic service, and manual labor, not to mention medicine, bureaucratic administration, tax collection, and diplomacy—four traditionally “Jewish” occupations that did not involve the buying and selling of material commodities.120 A few conversos even became clerics as late as the seventeenth century, despite repeated inquisitorial purges and the fact that “purity of blood” had become a legal requisite for entering religious orders and for assuming many ecclesiastical posts.121
Within the substratum of New Christian comerciantes122 itself there was substantial diversity. From penurious street vendors, to petty shopkeepers, artisans and seamstresses, to relatively comfortable arrendadores, it is clear that converso businessmen and merchants did not comprise a homogeneous group. In the world of these conversos, the word negocios (“business”—literally, “affairs” or “deals”) actually pointed to a variety of mercantile and sometimes non-mercantile activities. As Pilar Huerga Criado has observed, the purview of a single converso businessman could in fact be very broad: “The field in which converso businessmen developed their negocios extended to all economic sectors: Agricultural, artisanal, mercantile, and financial. One who exploited the land, also trafficked in cattle and wine, sold and bought cloths, and administered some rent.”123 Many a New Christian described himself (less often herself) as a mercader (or comerciante) de todos géneros—literally a “merchant of all genres of merchandise.”124 Somewhat reminiscent of the colloquial English term “jack of all trades,” this designation underscores the versatility that such individuals developed in order to survive within a variegated economic environment. The point is that New Christians did not form a monolithic class of capitalists or an undifferentiated bourgeoisie. Rather, they were a dynamic and well-integrated part of the Iberian economy whose activities in various fields, many if not most of them commercial, reflected the multifarious nature of that economy.
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